At the International Chronometry Congress held September 16 - 19, 1968 in Paris, a report entitled "2,4-MHz Quartz Wristwatch", presented by J. Luscher and H. Hofbauer, discussed a divider stage for a quartz timepiece with two amplifiers each constituted by a field-effect transistor of the insulated-gate type (IGFET) and a capacitor in series therewith. In that system, the principal amplifier controls the generation of the outgoing pulses of reduced cadence in response to periodic charging and discharging of an input capacitance defined by its insulated gate and its channel, the other amplifier forming part of the discharge circuit for that capacitance. Each amplifier is driven by a voltage taken from the junction of a pair of series transistors connected across a d-c power supply, one transistor of the pair receiving the incoming pulse sequence whose frequency is to be stepped down while the other transistor receives one of two trains of control pulses which are in mutual phase opposition. In such a divider the amplitude of the outgoing pulses could not exceed the voltage of the d-c supply.
With several such divider stages in cascade, the limited output amplitude of the preceding stage may result in an insufficiently rapid discharge of the gate capacitance of the principal IGFET of the following stage, especially at high pulse cadences on the order of several MHz.